Project Cars

Have you ever met your hero and realized the Myth was greater than the Man? It happens all the time—we build up our idea of someone (or something) but reality often has a way of letting us down. It doesn't happen every time though...

West Coast Customs in California is working on a special 356 project with our help. They're taking a Boxster chassis and reskinning it as a 356. They are using our sheetmetal and trim pieces to make the transformation for Justin Bieber.

Trevor Gates, the winner of our "We Can Save Them All" contest is making some progress on his rusted and busted 356A. He's got the doors just about done and he's working on recreating the engine compartment sheetmetal. It's a slow road—but we're happy to see forward momentum on this gargantuan project.

His once-in-three-pieces car was on display at the Dana Point concours and he's been working on getting the engine compartment box back in one piece. Quite a bit of the inner structure of the car was rusted and damaged during its long and very traumatic life—making this portion of the project slow and tedious as Trevor recreates the portions of the car that rarely need to be fixed—and are thus not yet available from suppliers like us.

With the engine out of our low-mileage SC, we could really take a look at all of the drivetrain and give it a once over. Unfortunately, one of our first checks—that of adjusting the valves—showed that we had an issue with our case studs. Several of them were broken.

With a car that's been sitting for years (decades?) the first thing to understand is that you're not just going to put a fresh battery in it and turn the key. The fuel has probably gone stale (does it smell like old varnish? if so..it's turned sour and won't burn) and you might have a lot of cleaning and flushing of fluids to do before you can start to even think about starting the car.

The winner of our "We Can Save Them All" contest was in for a really big project. Trevor knew that from the start, yet it's always a little surprising when even more rust is found—despite the fact that the 1957 356 was a sandblasted-bare shell.